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Kath­ar­ina Kitzinger re­ceives the MARUM Re­search Award

Jun 16, 2020

The sci­ent­ist Dr. Katharina Kitzinger from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology is one of the winners of this year's MARUM Research Award. She receives the award for her outstanding research on key processes in the nitrogen cycle in the sea, the microorganisms involved and the peculiarities of their metabolism.

 

„I am in­cred­ibly pleased that I re­ceived this year's MARUM re­search award for my doc­toral thesis,” says Kath­ar­ina Kitzinger. “I was only able to carry out my work in this form thanks to the many people in Bre­men and Vi­enna who al­ways sup­por­ted me. First to name are my su­per­visors Mar­cel Kuypers and Han­nah Marchant here in Bre­men, and Mi­chael Wag­ner at the Uni­versity of Vi­enna. Due to their sup­port, I was able to de­vote my­self en­tirely to my fa­vor­ite mi­croor­gan­isms – ni­trifers who play an es­sen­tial role in the global ni­tro­gen cycle.  Moreover, I got the op­por­tun­ity to ex­am­ine these or­gan­isms in a beau­ti­ful hab­itat – the ocean.”

The ni­tro­gen cycle in the sea is one of the most im­port­ant global ele­ment cycles, since the ele­ment ni­tro­gen is a com­pon­ent of pro­teins and many other nat­ural sub­stances, and is there­fore es­sen­tial to live. Ni­tro­gen cyc­ling in shelf wa­ters is cru­cial to re­duce sur­plus nu­tri­ents, poured into the ocean by rivers. Yet many of its as­pects are poorly un­der­stood. Kath­ar­ina Kitzinger has now suc­ceeded in find­ing an­swers to a long­stand­ing mys­tery in a key pro­cess of the ni­tro­gen cycle. Here you can find more in­form­a­tion on her re­search: "Mystery of marine recycling squad solved"

The MARUM - Centre for Marine Environmental Sciences of the University of Bremen an­nu­ally is­sues the MARUM Re­search Award for Mar­ine Sci­en­ces. This prize is awar­ded to out­stand­ing mas­ter's or doc­toral theses that have been writ­ten over the past two years by young mar­ine sci­ent­ists at the Uni­versity of Bre­men. The prize money of up to € 3,000 is to be used as a schol­ar­ship and is in­ten­ded to be­ne­fit the sci­entific ob­ject­ives of the awardee. The MARUM Re­search Award for Mar­ine Sci­en­ces is awar­ded in co­oper­a­tion with the "Ver­ein zur För­der­ung der wis­senschaft­lichen Forschung in der Freien Hans­es­tadt Bre­men (VFwF e.V.)"

Preisverleihung
Katharina Kitzinger (Picture: Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, A. Esken)

Information about Katharina Kitzinger:

 

Kath­ar­ina Kitzinger (born in 1989) already ex­amined ques­tions about the physiology of ni­trifers dur­ing her bach­el­or’s and mas­ter’s de­gree at the Uni­versity of Vi­enna (2009 – 2015). For her doc­toral thesis, Kitzinger stud­ied ni­tri­fic­a­tion in the ocean and worked mainly in Bre­men. She did her thesis at the Max Planck In­sti­tute (MPI) for Mar­ine Mi­cro­bi­o­logy (2015 – 2019), in co­oper­a­tion with the fac­ulty Geosciences at the Uni­versity Bre­men and the Centre for Mi­cro­bi­o­logy and En­vir­on­mental Sys­tems Sci­ence, Uni­versity of Vi­enna.

Title of her thesis: „In Situ Growth and Or­ga­nic Ni­tro­gen Uti­liza­t­i­on by the Main Ni­tri­fiers in the Oce­an“

Grade: 1 „summa cum laude“

Su­per­visors: Prof. Dr. Mar­cel Kuy­pers (Dir­ector of the MPI for Mar­ine Mi­cro­bi­o­logy and Pro­fessor for Bio­chem­istry at the Uni­versity Bre­men), Prof. Dr. Mi­cha­el Wag­ner (Dir­ector of the Centre for Mi­cro­bi­o­logy and En­vir­on­mental Sys­tems Sci­ence, Uni­versity of Vi­enna)

Since Septem­ber 2019, Kath­ar­ina Kitzinger works as a Post-Doc in the De­part­ment of Bio­chem­istry at the MPI Bre­men.

 
 

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